


Constant (The Sum of her Parts)

by rosereddawn



Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-06
Updated: 2011-05-06
Packaged: 2017-10-19 01:37:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/195445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosereddawn/pseuds/rosereddawn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>1 character, 50 sentences</p>
            </blockquote>





	Constant (The Sum of her Parts)

**Author's Note:**

> mentions of canon character death

**Fair Play**  
Dean got the white scar on his ring finger from a sharp edge inside her engine, and the spot on Sam's palm that won't wash off is a chipped piece of her paint grown into his calluses.

 **Bones**  
This is obviously not the reasoning behind the design of a family car, but the good thing about a trunk that big is that it will hold anything when a salt and burn goes south.  


 **Desire**  
An oil change, a pressure cleaning of the door jambs or the under guards, a nice hand polish: she's only getting a new set of used tires, but a girl can still dream.  


 **Flower**  
There is a bunch of roses withering away on her dashboard, and those roses are wrapped in newspaper that says “three more bodies, missing hearts”, and because John is on the hunt for said hearts instead of heading to an anniversary in Windom, Minnesota, she’ll just pretend that the only lady in his life these days is her.  


 **Hat Box**  
The Pennsylvanian bunny has to find a new home in Nebraska: that's as far as Sam can smuggle it in the cardboard box by his feet, Dean his ever loyal accomplice.  


 **Jump**  
“Whoa,” John mutters, one hand braced on the dashboard, the other ready to grip the wheel, “easy there on the gas, son.”  


 **Mother**  
Mary’s nails are scratching the leather wet with amniotic fluid and a Ford rips a long scratch into the painting on the rear because John is chasing down the road too fast, unfocused, shouting, “Wait wait wait, hospital's right there,” and Mary forces out a laugh between her screams, “Like this boy is going to listen.”  


 **Father**  
The baby cries, the little boy won't talk, the heat of the fire still ghosts across her hood, and to carry him and his weight is the only promise she can make the slumped man in the driver's seat.  


 **Saliva**  
There’s a tacky wet patch on her leather where an angel in his long fall from grace has arrived at oh so human sleep.  


 **Kaleidoscope**  
Doesn’t matter who’s driving: they’re all caught up in chasing loss.  


 **Primary Colors**  
She won’t buck because she trusts the boys’ judgment, but she’s wary nonetheless of the two women in the back, knowing that their petite forms hold something else, something vast and terrifying each in their own way.  


 **Ideal**  
Mary makes sure to clean off every last particle of graveyard dirt because despite her wants and wishes, there are still things she needs to do and things John mustn't know.  


 **Challenge**  
Yeah well, she might not be the youngest anymore, but she's still a solid car with a 427 under the hood, whereas that Charger – a damn Charger, hello? – is just a plastic piece of crap that's got nothing on good old Detroit steel, and how Sam and his soulless Vulcan logic don't realize that is beyond her.  


 **Scar**  
With meticulous stitches, Dean closes the gap in her upholstery, mumbling “I swear I’ll make that scumbag pay,” and the certainty in his statement makes her irrationally proud.  


 **Face**  
“Stop driving her into walls,” Dean shouts as he’s changing the headlight for the third time this year, and Sam bickers right back, “Yeah, I’ll just let the next ghost suck the life out of you, no problem.”  


 **Unzipped**  
She’ll never let Dean know that, but secretly she melts a little every time Sammy takes control of the wheel.  


 **Comfort**  
Their small bodies lie cradled in the worn leather of her backseat, kept safe from the night surging against her metal shell, safe until their father returns by sunrise.  


 **Homeland**  
A piece of ground wide enough for her wheel base, solid enough to carry two tons, and in-between two oceans nothing to hinder perpetual forward motion.  


 **Window**  
There is no air conditioning and the red hot desert heat brings no relief as it sweeps in through the windows, carrying only sand that colors their sweat and exhausted glares.  


 **Try**  
Her suspension will have to make up for the lack of a cradle, and across poorly tended roads she rolls softer until the baby is lulled to sleep.  


 **Black Cloud**  
Her tank is full and their wallets are empty.  


 **Call**  
That was Dean's finger that slipped on the horn, seriously, because she would never, she would absolutely positively never be caught doing something as cheesy as _to honk_ , not even at a truck as huge and shiny as the one rolling round the corner there, what with its polished grill and low-purring power.  


 **Design**  
The Impala model is six and one-half feet wide and over 17 feet long, as the withered brochure proudly states, and every time Sam successfully folds his legs in it’s a little miracle.  


 **Concentrate**  
It gets bad and when it does, she jump starts with a bark and revs at every shift of gear, all the louder to drown out the bone-shattering howls in her slipstream.  


 **Bite**  
Out of spite and principle, she catches Andy's finger in the door – serves him right, car-stealing jerk.  


 **Power**  
She knows that hard grip, has felt it from John, and now Sam charges through the nights with just the same desperate determination.  


 **Fingers**  
Dean opens the hood, says “Lemme look at you, baby” as he lays her bare, and then his oil-slicked fingers slide in and fix her right up.  


 **Damage**  
It's okay, she wants to say, it's okay: if a truck couldn't break me, then what damage can a crowbar do?  


 **Glue**  
Dean usually folds his hands on the roof while Sam rests a knee or his hips against the door on the other side; afterwards they always slip into their places more easily.  


 **Natural**  
She counts the days, weeks, months without him, refusing to grasp the concept of forever, and then he opens the door and gets in like he's never been gone.  


 **Respite**  
When two boots meet on the bumper bar and bottles click under a crisp and bright sky, then her engine ticks contentedly until her fluids and wires find sleep.  


 **Disaster**  
The radio flicks to static because she remembers damn well that some songs are bad luck.  


 **Accuse**  
Never does she complain when they drive her through sand and mud and gravel although she was built for asphalt and open roads, but no way, no way in hell, is she covering one more yard of snowbound mountain.  


 **Morning**  
Sleeping in the car means that the sun will wake you at an ungodly hour, but sometimes, like this morning in late September, the light will be broken by glass and atmosphere before it melts in from just the right angles so that the interior itself will appear to be the source of this benevolent shine, of this golden glow that casts out every last shadow; it's at that ungodly hour on a late September morning, parked on a field between Wisconsin and Idaho, that Dean’s lips curl into a smile just a moment before he wakes.  


 **Haunted**  
Running on fire, the scent of smoke never lifts.  


 **Wrong**  
Without Sam she runs lopsided, without Dean she’s just a vehicle.  


 **Note**  
The neatly folded paper remains tucked under her windshield wiper for three hundred miles, until the rain comes and washes another promised dream away.  


 **Go**  
The feet pushing down the gas pedal are too small and the little hands clinging to the steering wheel trembling, and Dean’s voice is shrill with panic as he screams at Sam to go faster; only John is eerily still.  


 **Upside Down**  
Sam, age 17, wants to be everything but a hunter, reads anything he can get his hands on, and looking up from a tale of relativity, seeing his Dad chasing miles again, he wonders whether maybe this car has never moved at all, but it is rather the universe shifting to feign and accustom the restlessness of this home.  


 **Keep Out**  
The core of steel, the stains of salt and holy water, the protective sigils under the panels: it’s all for nothing when the boys open the back door and push in an unconscious man that only looks like their dad.  


 **Sides**  
Shotguns replace the bibles as selling good becomes hunting evil, but that never empty bottle of hard liqueur in the glove box, that stays the same.  


 **Separation**  
She’s praying for Dean to re-open that hole in the ground, praying for him to understand that whatever it takes to keep the devil in isn’t enough to keep her out when she comes crushing through chains and brick and fire to raise Sammy from hell; but instead a blanket soon covers her in darkness and the garage door clicks shut.  


 **Trail**  
On Sam's side, crumbs plaster the footwell, his little fingers inept at keeping the tidiness Dean will restore before Dad can get angry.  


 **Liar**  
Sam knows the lies too, but he’s never there when Dean admits to them, curled up behind the wheel in the still of the night.  


 **Hour**  
“Take care of my wheels.”  


 **Easy**  
She rattles and rolls with the sway of the Canyon, vibrating where the beat thrums through her dash, and deep down she's mellow from the bass of their voices, loud and off-key but always in sync.  


 **Tie**  
Growing up in such intimacy, how can their hearts not be tuned to the rhythm of her engine?  


 **Sense**  
What stays with her after Sam gets back to his own form is as overwhelming as the hit of a lightning, crackling along her wires, bursting into sharp bites of sense memory, and while the feel of flesh and nerves is alien, it doesn't take away from the aching, loving familiarity of _Sam_.  


 **Education**  
Sam fixes the out-of-tune carburetor efficiently, and she finds herself missing the first time his hands, though big and as callused as his brother’s, touched her engine with such unacquainted care it tickled.  


 **Change**  
It’s a car, just a car, until one day a young ex-marine, new to this whole hunting business, carves the wrong set of sigils into the door.


End file.
